


A Thought Experiment

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [31]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:33:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23432458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: What would you do, if you knew what people were capable of?Taylor isn't sure.
Relationships: (kinda) - Relationship, Bakuda & Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [31]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 5
Kudos: 61





	A Thought Experiment

Would you kill baby Hitler?

As a thought experiment, it wasn’t exactly a great one. It was a more and less nuanced trolly problem tied up in the death of millions of innocents, the clinical subjugation and slaughter of a minority group. It wasn’t a question you could be wishy-washy about, you had to be sure what you were saying, and be resolute behind it, as otherwise, you could end up being really offensive to people who had suffered as a result of Adolf Hitler.

The answers to the question did, to an extent, say something about a person. There were those who said yes, they would, and by all accounts, they’d probably be justified in doing so. Stopping that future, that _slaughter_ , outweighed the death of a child. Others would say no, hinged on the innocence of the baby—he hasn’t done anything yet, therefore they can’t kill him, though that runs into the issue of it becoming a topic of preventative measures. When would you be fine to kill Hitler? Before or after he killed someone? Called for the death of millions? Wrote his logic into print and seeded an already heavily radicalized country with his dogma?

Then, by contrast, there were those who said no on the basis of not wanting to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; what, for example, would your role in things be if Hitler’s death led to the rise of somebody much worse? Or exacerbated an issue to the point where the end result was even _more_ wanton slaughter, more unhinged antisemitism, more hate? Admittedly, people who responded that way were _somewhat_ missing the point of the thought experiment, blurring the specifics of it, not really following the _rule_ of the question, just the text. Not to mention the people who say no on account of the political climate; killing a baby to save the Jewish population in the late 1800s wasn’t exactly going to hold up to public scrutiny, the era was already anti-Semitic enough, and when coupled Austria’s own bigotry, well, most people wouldn’t be terribly worried about Jewish people dying, and would instead target their ire on the person who would kill a poor, young Austrian babe, though these sorts of people missed the point even further.

No, the point of the question, when broken down into abstract, was thus: if you knew a person would go on to commit an atrocity, would you be justified in killing them to prevent it? Even if they’ve not committed a crime, and perhaps that crime might not even come to pass for years in the future, or maybe not at all?

Staring down Alice Richards, Taylor could really do with an answer right about now.

* * *

Alice hadn’t been the first person to raise this problem, and in all likelihood, she wouldn’t be the last.

No, to put things into perspective, it was probably best to go back a few steps, to qualify how she’d ended up there, sat in front of her tutor, a woman she knew would go on to do impossibly heinous things, in a long-abandoned, old-town little plaza full of mostly-empty cafes.

It hadn’t taken a lot for her father to figure out she’d ended up with powers. Not that the first week of having them had been easy to hide, she had hardly been subtle, but Thinker powers, in particular, can be nasty beasts. Migraines, random knowledge, dawning horror; unless you were among the scant few who ended up with enhanced skills or something, generally the average Thinker is pretty easy to identify shortly after their trigger event. She hadn’t been any different.

Her power was, functionally, that very same thought experiment. She knew, fundamentally, how far people would go, what they could do, their worst extremes. She could look at baby Hitler and, without even knowing the future, know how far he could go, where his extremes would be, what horrors he could achieve, and how likely he was to _do_ those horrors in the near future. If she focused on that information, she could see little snapshots into futures-that-might-not-be, three or four-second migraine-inducing terrors which she could recall with perfect clarity, an over-the-shoulder view of an atrocity at the hands of mortal, normal people who, before her powers, she would’ve never known about.

It didn’t help that learning how to stop herself from diving into them at the start. You know how you can sort of both visualize an ‘apple’ in the abstract, the concept of one, but also the image of one? If you close your eyes - or don’t - and just _think_ , you can kinda see it? But it’s phantasmal, indistinct, and slips out of your fingers if you try to retain it? Her power was like that, but with more depth, if she focused on it, took the information she gleaned at a glance and leaned into it, she’d get an image and then a short precognitive vision, a few seconds, and a headache for her troubles. It had been nearly impossible to stop herself from unintentionally dipping into those visions at the start, and living in Brockton Bay, going to a _gang school_ , had made her daily life... painful, both literally and metaphorically.

So, her father found out, and she broke down. Family bonding had lasted for roughly ten seconds until it sunk in for her father, a man who knew the horrors of Brockton, who had lived them, that his one and only child was regularly watching people do horrifying, monstrous things to one another, unable to stop herself, living in constant agony. There’d been no easy fix for this, and he wasn’t about to sign her up to deal with criminals - she’d seen one-too-many initiation visions for the white pride guys who she shared classes with, couldn’t imagine what she’d see if she glanced too deeply into Hookwolf or Victor - so, well, the best case for her was to get her out, get her away from a situation like that, to move her out of state or to at least find a way to keep her from the worst of life.

Admittedly, if she’d known that she could control the vision portion of her power, she probably would’ve rejected the idea, but then it had been less than a week since the incident and her skin still crawled, buzzed and hissed with the memory of it, so she’d complied and a few short weeks later she was reintroduced to her father’s sister, a woman she hadn’t known to exist, but had apparently met as an infant when her mother had forced the two siblings to reconcile. Stephanie Hebert was her name, and she’d split with her family after they’d found her kissing another girl and when she’d shown no real interest in being a housewife, and so like most her age, she’d made a pilgrimage to New York in hopes of finding community away from a bigoted family too entrenched in a rural town to care about her, and she’d found it.

Stephanie Hebert, as it happened, didn’t want to take care of her. She was a lesbian in her mid-forties with an on-and-off-again relationship with another woman who was, to be blunt, flighty and mercurial on the topic of commitment. Her existence was almost anathema to Stephanie’s girlfriend, a _teenager_ she had to take care of, but whatever her father had told her - powers included - had, apparently, been enough to sway her over. She was met with a startlingly similar face and height, an uncanny and blunt personality, but strikingly fluffy blonde hair to contrast her own and no horrors to be found dwelling away in that woman’s chest, not really.

So, a rough start, but not an unkind one. Stephanie had been patient, but when it became clear what grades she had managed to retain were tainted by the fact that Brockton Bay hadn’t gotten a reasonable education budget in over forty years, she hired a tutor. Taylor didn’t _want_ a tutor, didn’t want other people, didn’t want to think about how she’d have to experience a high school again, how she’d have to risk finding out some unspeakable horror, but, well, Stephanie wasn’t about to take her bullshit, not after just about giving up her girlfriend to house her.

This, as it happened, was when she met Alice.

* * *

Alice herself was almost a thought experiment, though that was more because she was trying to drag out the metaphor.

Simply, Alice was too smart, far, far too smart. There’s an old and known trend about gifted kids coming up short when they leave elementary school and very abruptly finding themselves untethered, unbound. A lot of these kids, especially those with shaky home lives, sourced most of their validation from their teacher’s praise and had built themselves into tiny perfectionists. When that perfection couldn’t be upheld, when the things that tethered them, kept them grounded, weren’t there, they came undone, crumpled into themselves with no way to fix it.

In a better world, Alice would’ve been one of those kids. Gifted early on, but then being forced to face reality, but this _wasn’t_ a better world. If the world didn’t work through byzantine logic about triggering with powers, if people could stumble into radioactive waste and come out of it with four arms and the ability to breathe fire, Alice would be one of those people who fashioned a suit of power armour at the age of six because she got _bored_. Alice was prodigal, a genius, she never had to face reality because her mind outpaced the median average so severely that her entire life was built on the back of her success, of her _perfection_.

A kinder world would have broken that perfection, shown her that perfection _isn’t possible_ —because perfection is unchanging and static and there is nothing wrong in being _imperfect_ —when she was younger. But then, this wasn’t a kind world, or a better world, or a fair world, because at nineteen years old Alice was clotheslined by reality with little regard for her fragility. She broke, she shattered, and Taylor saw just what that would do to her.

Would you kill baby Hitler?

Would you kill the girl who would turn your hometown into a bombed-out husk, who would shove bombs into the heads of the innocent to prove her authority?

The worst part about Alice was that she was _still right_. She had been misgraded because the person teaching her _disliked her_ , and chose to take points off of an otherwise sterling report because she used double spaces. All of that perfection, all of those lost nights, her jealous peers, it had collapsed on her head because the man in charge of her class thought _little_ of her, wanted to bring her down to earth when there had been nothing but the clouds for Alice since she had first been enrolled in school. Her inability to get that grade changed, her peers' less-than-subtle mockery, it made her snap, and like Taylor, like everyone else with a power, she triggered.

Alice’s ego was justified on the back of her accomplishments. She was atypical for a genius, she knew how to explain complicated nuances, had walked Taylor through work they wouldn’t’ve covered until twelfth grade in Brockton, and she taught it to her with ease. Everything Alice did, she accomplished, she _succeeded_ , and for what? For someone else to tell her she was wrong? For someone else to rip away the unreality she had existed in, to tell her she was flying too close to the sun? But that was the thing, she was flying too high, so high that the drop?

It might just kill everyone with her.

* * *

Old Cornell was a plaza that used to be the campus that housed Cornell University. Originally, after Behemoth had torn through New York, they had intended to rebuild it on-site, but they’d gotten access to a more centralized location about half-way through construction and decided to swap. What they were left with was a plaza that had a handful of half-built buildings, none of which were too expensive to complete. Instead of leaving it to rot, they sold the lots out to shop owners, made it into a small little place full of cafes and a sedate location to relax in.

For the most part, Old Cornell was mostly abandoned. Not that it wasn’t used, but the number of times Taylor had actually been present it had only really been her and Alice, sitting face-to-face in some of the outdoor seating, a small table separating them. People left the plaza alone at most parts of the day, largely because even though Cornell students got a discount on everything sold there, the main campus was now a subway ride away, and the travel costs negated the already kinda stingy discount that a student ID provided.

Most of the shops had ended up closing as a result, leaving only a few of the main franchises - a Starbucks, a Dunkin’ Donuts, one out-of-place Footlocker - to fill in an otherwise vast, empty plaza full of not a whole lot to do, in an area that was already somewhat out-of-the-way to begin with.

So, she and Alice were alone, as they had been the time before now, and the time before that. Alice was hunched over, looking tired and thin-tempered, looking at the papers in her hand. School had started up less than a month ago, and those were some of her assignments, things she probably couldn’t have done so well with if Alice hadn’t been there to help her study. There was something pleased in the back of her gaze, _validated_ , but it didn’t get very far, was buried beneath the fatigue, the twitchiness, and the way her power screamed at her about Cornell, about what Alice could do, about the bomb she would use to hold the place hostage. What she was about to do, how close that future felt, that atrocity.

Taylor swallowed, her throat dry, parched. The knife sat heavy in the pocket of her pants, bit slightly into her skin.

Alice’s backpack was different, larger and bulkier; viscerally familiar.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve done this well,” Alice finally said, glancing up from her page, fake smile plastered over her face. She set the papers down, nudging them forward with her fingers. “At least half of my summer didn’t go to waste.”

Taylor didn’t say anything, but then Alice was used to her being slow to speak. Not that she normally was, getting out of Brockton had done something for her mental health, but she was around Alice, if only because she didn’t trust herself not to blurt out what she was thinking, not to try to beg an egomaniac not to kill the very same city she’d moved from.

But, then, she didn’t have much of an option, did she? The bag was telling, the weight of her power more so. Nothing had changed, she had changed nothing, but she _had_ to change something, at least try to.

“You’re starting back at Cornell today, right?” Taylor found herself saying, voice vacant.

Alice sniffed. “Why do you sound so glum? I can’t tutor you after that, are you feeling abandoned or something?”

Taylor shrugged, not saying anything.

There was no comfort in Alice’s gaze, she wasn’t a person who could drum that sort of thing up, but there _was_ a fondness behind those eyes, one that made Taylor’s skin crawl, that made her want to dig fingers into her skin, rip away the top layer and scream.

“Well,” Alice said into the silence, sounding uncomfortable, unsure, almost like she had stage fright. “It’s time for me to go, I’m going to be seeing the principal today.” _About the report_ was unspoken, but from the way her fingers tensed around the black strap of her bag, the way mirth stained her eyes, the way her power flew into a fever pitch, pounding behind the lids of her eyes, screaming _look at this, look at what she is about to do_ , it was obvious.

Flicking her tongue across chapped lips, Taylor rose with her. Her fingers shook, even as she slipped them into her pocket, wrapped around the hilt of the knife, drew it free and up into the sleeve of her hoodie. Alice didn’t notice, too busy making sure the bulky, matte-coloured backpack was firmly on her back, her eyes looking almost longingly at it.

Would you kill someone, if it meant stopping the death of thousands? What about hundreds? When does one murder become justified?

“Alice?”

Eyes turned to her, to the knife that hadn’t been fully pulled into her sleeve, and narrowed. For a second, there was betrayal in those eyes, and part of Taylor clenched unexpectedly, an attachment she didn’t know she’d made.

“What’s in the bag, Alice?”


End file.
